Father Pavone praises pro-life media
messages

by Carol Baass Sowa

Today's Catholic
Diocese of San Antonio, TX

SAN ANTONIO. Two driving forces in
the pro-life movement came together in San Antonio on June 29 when the
Majella Society, in
partnership with the archdiocesan Office of Social Concerns, brought in Father
Frank Pavone to speak to a packed house at Church of the Holy Spirit.

Active in the pro-life movement since
1976, Father Pavone is national director for Priests for Life, president of the
National Pro-Life Religious
Council and pastoral director for
Rachel’s Vineyard
[A Ministry of Priests for Life], an international retreat program for
post-abortion healing. In 1999 he was named one of the “Top 100 Catholics of the
Century.”

He has traveled to all 50 states and to
five continents, speaking out against abortion, including addressing the clergy
of India on life issues at the request of Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta.
“Jane Roe” of the famous Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision came to call him
“the catalyst that brought me to the Catholic Church,” and he was present with
Terri Schiavo in her final moments and an
outspoken advocate for her life.

Opening the evening was Luke Doyle,
executive director of the Majella Society, an organization which uses the mass
media to change attitudes on abortion.

Named after St. Gerard Majella, the patron
saint of motherhood and difficult pregnancies, the Austin-based Majella Society
entered the San Antonio market last December with a series of pro-life
television commercials and billboards. They also make use of the Internet
through
www.teenbreaks.com.

“Our goal,” said Doyle, “is to make sure
that the bottom line is we reduce the abortion rate in the state of Texas and
that the vast majority of Texans view abortion as absolutely unthinkable.”

A similar advertising program in
Wisconsin, whose population is around five million, reduced their abortion rate
by 23 percent over a 10 year period, Doyle stated, saving an estimated 60,000
lives that would have otherwise been aborted. “We have just over 20 million
people here in the state of Texas,” he said. “Imagine, if we’re saving 60,000
lives in Wisconsin over that period of time, what we can do here in Texas.”

The Majella Society makes use of two types
of advertising — one aimed at changing attitude, the other offering a number
(1-800-712-HELP) that can connect the caller to pro-life pregnancy counseling in
their area. Doyle noted that in the Majella Society’s first campaign there was a
93 percent increase in calls to the 1-800 number and, during their second
campaign, a 147 percent increase in calls.

“So we are able to not only change
attitudes and beliefs on the issue of abortions,” he said, “we are also
extending a helping hand to get women into the centers, into the counseling that
they need to make a decision for life.” He noted a very high percentage of women
who had an abortion, when interviewed, said, “If I had had information on
alternatives, I most likely would have made a different choice.”

Father Pavone has founded a
community of priests
permanently dedicated to full-time pro-life work, based in the Diocese of
Amarillo, and spoke glowingly of this historic step. “Never before in the
history of the church,” he said, “has there been a community — technically, it’s
called a Society of Apostolic Life — an opportunity for young men to become
priests, not simply to do the many marvelous ministries that a priest can do,
but specifically to fight for the unborn.”

These priests, he said, will be able to
help their fellow priests “speak more clearly and courageously, minister more
compassionately, mobilize more effectively and do what Christ says we have to do
for our brothers and sisters when he defines the meaning of love.”

Love, Father Pavone noted, means laying
down one’s life for others — the exact opposite of abortion, which is actually
sacrificing another person for the good of one’s self.

Praising the Majella Society for their
efforts, he said, “What a marvelous goal it would be to get these commercials on
constantly, not only throughout Texas, but throughout the country.” He added
that the support given to the society’s efforts will help achieve this goal. “We
have to keep putting this message before the minds and hearts of the American
people,” he said.

Despite the media being filled with
pro-abortion messages, Father Pavone believes wholeheartedly in the words of
Pope John Paul II: “Error may sometimes have a bigger pulpit, but there is a
grace that comes with the word of truth, a grace that the words of falsehood can
never have, a grace that is more powerful to transform minds and hearts than any
amount of error.”

“We don’t have to be distracted by the
fact that falsehood has such a big pulpit,” said Father Pavone. “We’ve got to be
focused on the fact that now we have a pulpit for the word of truth and for the
word of life, and we have a concrete way of advancing that effort to connect
with so many more minds and hearts.”

Emphasizing the importance of the Majella
Society’s campaign, he pointed out there are three distinct ways their media
messages connect with people. The first is through “cognitive dissonance,” which
occurs when a person believes something to be true but then hears new
information that creates a conflict in their mind, forcing them to reconsider
what they truly believe.

He gave as example the state and federal
laws that protect unborn children from attacks and acts of violence other than
abortion. This means, he observed, that a pregnant woman who is driving herself
to a clinic for an abortion could have her car struck by a drunken driver,
killing the unborn child, and the driver would be charged with the death of the
child the woman was about to have legally killed.

He noted this cognitive dissonance took
place when the physician who ran the largest abortion facility in the Western
world came to doubt the validity of abortion after being struck by the
incongruity of working in a building where babies were being aborted on one
floor, while on another, heroic efforts were being used to save babies at the
same gestational age.

Father Pavone also recalled the instance
of a woman who spoke to him following one of his talks at a parish. She had
considered herself 100 percent pro-abortion until she heard him preach, but
totally reversed her views following his talk.

Two things he had said changed her mind.
The first was learning that more lives are lost to abortions in one year than
all the lives lost in all the wars our nation has been involved in since its
beginning. The second was the story he told of the sea turtles at a beach he had
visited one day while preaching on abortion in Florida.

A sign on the beach stated that the sea
turtles and their eggs were protected by local, state and federal laws. “And I
asked the question in the homily,” said Father Pavone, “‘If we don’t have the
right to choose to smash the egg of a sea turtle, how and why do we have the
right to choose to smash a baby?’”

“Imagine the power of having ads that
raise this cognitive dissonance constantly airing, constantly making people
think about it,” he said to his San Antonio audience.

In addition to the use of cognitive
dissonance, the Majella Society’s ads provide outreach to those tempted to
abort, Father Pavone noted. Though we all fight abortion and want to protect
unborn children, he said, we don’t actually come in contact with them. “What we
see walking down the street,” he said, “is a young woman who is so desperate and
afraid and feels so ashamed and terrified that she experiences the terrible
temptation to kill her own child.”

We can reach out to this woman by telling
her she has a choice, he added, and this is what the Majella Society ads offer
in the 1-800 number. “We don’t stand up before the world and point a finger of
condemnation,” he said. “No. We extend a hand of mercy and of help to lift them
up out of despair.”

“Abortion is not only a sin against life,”
he continued. “It is a sin against hope, an act of despair.” Thus the third
focus of the Majella Society’s advertising campaign is extending hope to those
who have already had an abortion and reaching out to “the woman and the man who
have been enveloped in the despair that comes after abortion.”

Father Pavone noted that Priests for Life
is privileged to be coordinating and operating the world’s largest abortion
healing ministry, Rachel’s Vineyard Retreats. Many dioceses around the country
use this as their Project Rachel program.

Priests for Life is also involved in the
Silent No More
Campaign, in which men and women who have personally experienced the pain of
abortion, are speaking out to express their regrets. “And they are becoming the
new sign,” he said. “They are becoming the new source of hope to others who have
also fallen into that abyss.”

In conclusion, Father Pavone stated that
the abortion industry is, even now, collapsing from within. “Abortion destroys
itself,” he said. “They cannot sustain the lies and the falsehoods that are
behind this greatest of all evils. They can’t even get doctors to do the
procedure, no matter how legal it is.”

Instead, he noted, the abortion industry
is falling back, as a last stand, on the argument that abortion is a decision
between a woman and her God. This means, he said, that they have run out of
arguments and their only hope of succeeding is if the pro-life message fails to
get out.

“Brothers and sisters,” he said, “don’t
have any doubt that the message that you’re helping to get out to the people of
Texas, to the people of San Antonio, to the people of America, is converting and
consoling and changing people.” “That’s not what we have to fear,” he said.
“There is only one thing that we have to fear and that is that they won’t get
out at all.”